Real leadership lessons from technical rooms.
IT Leaders feels like sitting in the room after breakfast, listening to experienced operators explain what actually broke, what they learned, and what they would do differently. The show suits people who manage technical teams, sponsor technology work, or need IT to speak in business terms.
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IT Leaders is a live-room leadership series for people who work where technology, operations, and human judgment collide. Its episodes sound like conference talks and facilitated sessions, with speakers thinking out loud rather than reading from a script. That informality is part of the value. The show gives listeners the stories behind leadership advice: an organization expanding across many locations, a consulting firm rebuilding after a hard sales year, a retired IT leader looking back on global scale and succession, and a cybersecurity founder explaining how trust actually holds a team together. It keeps coming back to the gap between technical competence and leadership maturity. Knowing the system is not enough. Leaders have to let smart staff challenge them, give teams flexibility, communicate at the customer's level, and stop treating every management framework as a machine that guarantees results. The best episodes are blunt about ego. They ask whether a manager wants people in the office because the work requires it, or because seeing them feels like control. They ask why companies create cloud and AI strategies while also saying innovation should start with a business problem. They ask why change is treated like an event with an end date when organizations are always adapting. The show also understands that IT teams are often full of unusual strengths: pattern recognition, analytical depth, systems thinking, creative problem solving, and working styles that do not always fit tidy corporate expectations. Its business language is accessible, but the stakes are real. Budgets are wasted when transformation ignores the people doing the work. Trust collapses when leaders make the work about their own win. Succession fails when future leaders are expected to be perfect before they are ready. IT Leaders is strongest when it stays close to those tensions, letting experienced speakers turn scars into usable operating principles.
Made for: IT directors, CIOs, technology managers, consultants, and business leaders who work with technical teams. It also fits operators moving from technical execution into broader leadership responsibility.
What sets it apart: The show keeps the live-session texture intact, so advice arrives through stories, audience prompts, missteps, and practical examples. It focuses less on shiny tools and more on the leadership habits that determine whether technology work actually lands.
IT Leaders is the podcast for IT Directors, CIOs, and technology decision-makers seeking actionable insights and executive-level leadership strategies. Produced by the IT Leaders Council and powered by Expedient, each episode features expert guest speakers, peer-to-peer discussions, and real-world stories from the front lines of enterprise IT. Recorded live at leadership events in Indianapolis, IN, Columbus, OH, and expanding nationwide, IT Leaders delivers vendor-neutral content focused on cloud strategy, digital transformation, data center modernization, and IT operations leadership. Join the conversation that helps shape the future of IT.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
IT Leaders makes technology management concrete through candid accounts of organizational change, cross-department trust, and decisions tested against real operating constraints.
IT Leaders follows technology executives and advisers into the decisions where systems work meets management judgment. Episodes play as presentation-led talks, often with questions from the room, and repeatedly examine how leaders earn trust, involve colleagues in change, and…
A change consultant admits he sold certainty for years; your transformation plan deserves that honesty.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
People power skills linked to mission, behavior, and team execution.
This talk treats IT leadership as a people problem first, with Laura Hammonway drawing a clear line between mission, strategy, behavior, team impact, and the daily work of customer service, operations, people and culture, and strategy.
Brad Clark makes a clear case for treating change as a constant condition, not a one-time event.
Brad Clark argues that change should be treated as a standing condition, not a one-off fix. He pushes back on the idea that one framework or playbook can solve the problem, and he names the "eventification problem" plainly.
A practical trust framework from a cybersecurity founder who treats leadership as a trust test.
A cybersecurity founder frames trust as a leadership test, drawing on his work as CEO and founder of Echelon Risk and Cyber. Dan Desco keeps the focus on the human side of leadership with a trust model built around credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation.
A practical CIO story about trust, automation, and getting a member-facing phone change right.
Chris Sibyla's conversation stays close to a familiar IT challenge with real stakes: how a leader in financial services earns enough trust to change how work gets done.
A grounded look at leadership under rapid change.
Maureen Metcalf treats technology leadership as a pressure test for a changing economy, drawing on the seven mindsets research first laid out in Leadership 2050.
Business leaders, market lessons, real operating stories.
Leadership thinking under real pressure.
Calmer leadership, clearer teams, stronger trust.
This episode features Mike Kessler discussing how to apply Mel Robbins' 'let them' theory to reduce stress and improve leadership in IT by releasing the need to control others.
Laura starts with a career detour.
Joe Pusz shares his journey from corporate program leadership to founding and growing PMO Squad, a project management consulting firm, highlighting the challenges and resilience required in entrepreneurship.
Eileen Bewley shares her personal story about building effective relationships between non-technical and technical teams through networking and shared experiences.
A retired IT executive shares his journey from PC support to leading global IT and business operations at Parker Hannafin, focusing on succession planning and the challenges of running a business during the Great Recession.
This episode explores the challenges of innovation in organizations and discusses when to lead with technology strategies like cloud and AI versus focusing on solving business problems.
Brad Clark starts with a disclaimer.
He starts right away.
Chris Sibylla traces more than 30 years in financial services and his work as CIO at Financial Center First Credit Union.
Maryann Byrdak shares her personal journey from discovering computer science through a high school counselor to becoming a CIO, emphasizing the importance of coaching, mentoring, and promoting from within for team growth.
Michael Carducci discusses his journey in IT leadership, overcoming imposter syndrome by learning to embrace vulnerability and drawing inspiration from Richard Feynman's experiences.
Nirav Shah shares personal anecdotes about procrastination, preparation for a presentation, and his one-year work anniversary while discussing leadership and intrinsic motivation in teams.
Maureen Metcalf opens by naming the pressure on leaders as the world changes fast.